Ceysson & Bénétière

“I felt myself to be, for an unknown period of time, an abstract perceiver of the world.”

I am in front of my computer, and you are about to step in a labyrinth. Your possibilities are numerous and my questions endless. 

I have gathered data (maps, images, texts) to accompany your visit. Two months getting lost in them. Would you be kind enough, since you are fortunate to be about to wander in the finally complete version of the labyrinth, to actively try to get lost in it? 

But first, do you really know where you are? 

There are four possible options, but you are necessarily already somewhere: 

1- at Parc de la Tête d’Or

2- at Ceysson & Bénétière, in the old town

3- in the entrance hall of the LPA République parking

4- at the Fagor Brandt factory, Contemporary Art Biennale Center

And you are also with me on a train from Paris to Geneva.  

If you are in 1, try to see the fourth dimension. If you are in 4, try to find your way in the first. In 2 and 3, you are entering a grey area. I imagine that you are faced with several options. The ones I recommend are partial and incomplete, but they might lead you somewhere I don’t know.

You are trying the scientific track

Given points in definite spaces (corresponding to eight possibilities of photo shooting sites – Paris, Shanghai, Tokyo, Berlin, Montreal, New York, Geneva, and Beirut, mostly) and a past unknown to us. Each x point is a “latent shot” (LS). Given other points in space here (the exhibition spaces 1,2,3,4) and now (the t-time of your visit). 

Given segments between those points, the vectors of the latent shots (xLS) leading to their exhibition (t1/2/3/4). There is also a multitude of straight lines in the installation map that converge toward the same anchor point in the present space and form unique combinatorics in time. In 4, a complex triangular scheme draws a labyrinthine pattern on the floor. 

You are leaving the planar for the volumetric space. Its unit is a geometrical figure, the rectangle, and a deceptively bi-dimensional material, glass, itself divided into three distinct types: 

-       The LS are captured by the photographic glass captures 

-       You are captured by the glass mirror 

-       Viewpoints are captured by the ordinary glass 

There are other media sometimes (crates, Dibond photographs, silkscreens) but they don’t alter the structure. Printed images are displayed on glass panels and organized in series that follow their own logic. They are part of the plan and the hypercube. 

You prefer to follow the photographic track 

You are in front of images of photographic nature. They appear and disappear as you move in the work. When they are the same size as the glass, the images become one with it. They punctuate the labyrinth with landscape openings, city perspectives, and a few powerful but faraway silhouettes in eloquent yet impenetrable attitudes.

Sometimes you can see the landscape from windows without glass, or barely hidden behind trees or makeshift curtains. You are in front or diagonal to some partitions, architecture and trees that obstruct the horizon without blocking the view. Are you rather inside or outside the image? Hidden or exposed? The doubt about your position in the image probably adds to the one provoked by the installation. 

Other series of photographs of various formats open lateral pathways and might also be calling your attention: negative series of old, spectral portraits, sometimes damaged, photos of streets and places that you might recognize, as well as inscriptions that you might try to decipher. 

On the screen in front of me, the images are not merged with the glass, and I am painfully looking for documentary clues. But you, being inside the work, in the starry reflections of the glass and in front of the mirrors, do you even feel like it? Doesn’t one always fail when trying to find direction in a dream? 

You are now on the historic track. 

This path is delicate, because the labyrinth defies chronological linearity and looks neither to understand nor to explain. The visual clues you will find scattered double the number of enigmas with uncertain resolutions. Its evasive story hasn’t been written from a winner’s point of view but through the interlacing of many others. It was weaved from listening to discreet witnesses and accomplices whose names are mentioned but whose words you won’t hear. The echo of their memories and their attachments to their town silently resounds at the surface of the glass and is diffracted in its mise-en-abyme. A few images whisper the lost splendor of the Sursock palace, awakening the nostalgia of Achrafieh’s golden triangle. With a clear and fast handwriting, Mrs. X took note of the urban fights she witnessed in 1958, precursors of many others, maybe reviving memories of the civil war. 

 Looking toward the mountains. A devastated apartment near the port is under shock. These images thus activated don’t claim to tell the truth. They serve instead as bridges and echoes. The glass dissolves their temporality. They are both precise and floating, specific but common. They rebound inside us like in a ground of emotions. In a temporal crack, these suspended images become “stationary waves”2.

You are probably in Beirut, but you might be fantasizing about being somewhere else entirely, like I am. The labyrinth is a memory device. 

You are now on the historic track. 

This path is delicate, because the labyrinth defies chronological linearity and looks neither to understand nor to explain. The visual clues you will find scattered double the number of enigmas with uncertain resolutions. Its evasive story hasn’t been written from a winner’s point of view but through the interlacing of many others. It was weaved from listening to discreet witnesses and accomplices whose names are mentioned but whose words you won’t hear. The echo of their memories and their attachments to their town silently resounds at the surface of the glass and is diffracted in its mise-en-abyme. A few images whisper the lost splendor of the Sursock palace, awakening the nostalgia of Achrafieh’s golden triangle. With a clear and fast handwriting, Mrs. X took note of the urban fights she witnessed in 1958, precursors of many others, maybe reviving memories of the civil war. 

Looking toward the mountains. A devastated apartment near the port is under shock. These images thus activated don’t claim to tell the truth. They serve instead as bridges and echoes. The glass dissolves their temporality. They are both precise and floating, specific but common. They rebound inside us like in a ground of emotions. In a temporal crack, these suspended images become “stationary waves”.

You are probably in Beirut, but you might be fantasizing about being somewhere else entirely, like I am. The labyrinth is a memory device. 

You chose the fictional track

It is the one I have been favoring from the beginning, and the one you can also start with. It is a romantic path, a bit mystical too, where one orients oneself following a factual yet mysterious title: Midnight at Roland’s [December 31]. This fiction started with a short handwritten note and turned into a labyrinthine work. It connects two cities and two women, maybe more, mirroring each other, fifty years apart. The only thing you will know is that their life follows parallel trajectories between Lyon and Beirut, 1958 and 2022. A modest object has been passed from one to the other, and became an omen in every respect. It contains dates, addresses, and events.  

It is a pretext and a substrate to build a script, set a stage and imagine protagonists. It tells us about secret dreams coming true, and crowded cities confronted with the chaos of war. This fiction starts with the promise of a new year eve’s party with friends and ends with the birth of two babies. It is as simple as that. But you could make it more complex by adding an adventurous, busy and very organized photographer, a palace where a very old aristocrat has lived secluded, an assassination with gruesome consequences and an explosion that broke dreams and windows. 

In this fiction, the labyrinth, like the city, is an active and abysmal stage where you can now lose yourself.  

Garance Chabert, August 2022